Daedalic Entertainment has announced the release of The Night of the Rabbit. The adventure game centers around the adventures of 12 year old Jerry, a young man who dreams of magic. After traveling to a magical world Jerry and his friends must foil the schemes of an evil wizard.

Lose yourself in a tale of magic and wonder, where anything is possible and where nothing is quite as it seems: join young Jerry and follow a peculiar white rabbit to the wondrous realm of Mousewood, a land where critters can speak and where mystery abounds.

It is here that Jerry’s dream of being a magician comes true, though a haunting, sinister force casts a long shadow over the forest. Someone offers the residents of Mousewood a deal of their lifetime - tickets to the greatest magic show that the world has ever seen. But the price is steep, as they'll have to stake their most precious possessions and also their lives.

As the shadows grow deeper, the residents of Mousewood have only Jerry to turn to. On an adventure full of laughter and tears, joy and fear, the young boy will face the ultimate trial, leaving behind the world he once knew, and his childhood, too, will become a thing of the past.

Features:

Story-driven exploration/adventure: The Night of the Rabbit was conceived, written and designed by Matthias Kempke, who believes that games design is all about creating new worlds to be explored by players.

Multi-layered story: it starts out in a light-hearted and funny way, but soon shift to a dramatic and thought-provoking tone over the 20 hours of gameplay.

Original character and world design: the animal people who populate the game were originally developed in short stories written by game creator; these stories are included as the in-game bonuses.

Feral Interactive and Mac Game Store are partnering to offer a Mac games bundle that includes six titles for less than $20.

Game fans can purchase the bundle, which includes LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, DiRT 2, Battlestations Pacific, The Movies: Superstar Edition, Tropico 3: Gold Edition, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The bundle will be available from the Mac Game Store for $19.99 (USD) with the offer running through Sunday, June 2nd.

Anuman Interactive's Monument Builders: Notre Dame is now available for download and purchase at Macgamestore.com. The game gives players the chance to turn back the clock and participate in the construction of the iconic cathedral in Paris.

Participate in the construction of the iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris while learning tons of anecdotes.

Become the construction site manager of one of the world's most famous monuments: clear the site, build quarries, and destroy giant hams to feed your workers.

Don't forget to build the gargoyles and the bells, otherwise the project will be delayed!

Obsidian Entertainment has released another new early development blog post focusing on the creation of its upcoming Project Eternity RPG. The post reveals details about the ongoing work of environment artists, animators, character artists, and concept artists to create a unique look for the RPG. The update includes some new artwork showcasing an early user interface design.

Hector - Wilderness AreasOur Lead Environment Artist has been developing a couple of our larger external landscapes. He's doing this on the basis of a designer's block-out: a crude-but-playable space. This includes the sculpting of terrain geometry in ZBrush, application of grass and dirt via mesh painting and masking in Maya, placement of objects such as structures, trees, and rocks, etc., lighting and rendering the scene, which generates our super-cool depth info. He imports all those results into the game, and then Design says: "Hey, something has come up and we need a temple in the village." So, Hector moves and massages the scene around to accommodate the change and steps through the process again. In the prototype, iteration of the village, a temple wasn't required. For the Vertical Slice, having a place where one can get quests and learn some spiritual-magicky stuff, is an important feature to include. So, we find a way to happily put it in.

Sean - Dungeon/Crypt and village interiorsOur other Environment Artist has been working on interiors of village structures and dungeons! He uses ZBrush less for his environments as a whole, and more as a means of creating smaller natural-looking rocky things and dungeon walls. Beyond that the techniques for implementing his work are the same. The feedback and iteration with design usually yields similar tweaks and modifications. Changes like: "Uhh...we can't have a door here, anymore. Can we make it a pile of collapsed rocks, instead?" Of course the answer is "Yes!"

The answer has to be "yes," because the game is worthless if the gameplay isn't worthwhile. It could be that an important critical path encounter needs to occur, maybe because the story evolved or it’s just too good an experience to allow an alternate route to exist. Ultimately, we trust our designers to wrestle with these issues and come to us with changes that matter. So if they come to us with a change, and the adjustment is reasonable and the time exists to make it, we will do it.

inXile Entertainment recently posted another update to its Kickstarter campaign for Torment: Tides of Numenera, a spiritual successor to the classic Planescape: Torment fantasy RPG. The post offers a status update on the progress of the game including details about early combat design and developing the storyline.

We’ve thought a bit about how we’ll approach the combat discussion when the time comes. We are planning a staged approach over a period of a few weeks. First, we’ll present the high level designs for the systems we think would work best for Torment based upon all of the other design work we’ll have done by then. We’ll then create a separate, backer-only Combat forum on User Voice for the topic to be discussed. A bit later, we’ll open up “voting” on this forum – thereby giving everyone who is interested some time to read and think about the approaches, as well as the ideas and comments of other backers, before weighing in numerically. We’ll leave the forum open until any debate has stabilized - we don’t expect there to be complete consensus, but after some time the major points will have been made and we’ll have enough information to make our decision.

Some of you have expressed concern that a popular vote could override our judgment and lead to an inferior game. This is a valid concern, but we’re not going to let this happen. First, we’re not going to present any option that we feel would be tragic for Torment. Second, we won’t blindly look at the numbers and decide based on those. Ultimately, we’ll take everyone’s comments and ideas into account and make the decision that we feel will be best for the game. But, again, this will be some time in the future – after we have fleshed out enough of the more pressing design topics to give combat the thorough attention it deserves.